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No there isn't. Trump has hardcore fans who will never abandon him, sure, but he has more critics.
NSFW Bolsonaro's speech at the UN
- Thread starter regular john
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Before and immediately after the election Brazilian-Americans tried to defend him. I stayed out of it bc I'm not overly familiar with Brazilian politics.
But now the honeymoon is over (it was short) and his "I'm not Lula/PT" appeal ain't gonna cut it any more. The same Brazilian-Americans who used to defend him are quiet now when I mention how the fires in the Amazon are all Bolsonaro's fault.
If you wanted proof that he's pretty worthless, these articles are it in a nutshell.
so there's no such thing as a socialist in Western politics, therefore Lula can't be one. Brilliant deductive logic.
But I still go by the meaning of words, and socialism is political and economic theory where 'community' ownership of resources is managed through central planning.
so there's plenty of socialism in Western civilization. And plenty of socialists in Western politics.
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So regardless, Brazil wasn't "on the brink of socialism" under PT.
Brazil is controled by an agrarian oligarchy and wastes its resources on never ending "debt" payment that feeds the economic system. Brazil paid over 1 trillion "Reais"/~266 billion dollars in federal debt in 2018 - source: https://auditoriacidada.org.br/; that is a capitalist wonderland.
M
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How close is the country to fixing its excessively generous pension system? It's very strange to me as an American that the child of a deceased former military service member can claim his pension for the rest of the child's life.
There are plenty of socialist leaning folks in Western politics and both Lula and Dilma were certainly sympathetic to some socialist rhetoric, but your definition of socialism is so broad that it could encompass pretty much anything that's not market driven. In terms of actual policies and governance, the PT's policies largely hewed to neoliberal orthodoxy with a few social democratic reforms. Most aspects of the Brazilian economy that were public prior to the PT taking power stayed public and most things private stayed private. There were no serious nationalization schemes under the PT and there were no meaningful initiatives to allow workers to seize the means of production. Mostly there was an enlargement of the welfare state and the regulatory state.
There's a big social security reform in transit which takes pensions away from poor elder people and public employees who earned benefits under the current regime and - guess what? - proposes a capitalization system where banks will control retirement funds.
But of course military pensions aren't at stake. This is Bolsonaro's niche territory - the one he catered for during his 30 year legislative "career" and which he will go back to when he finally finishes disappointing all the clueless people who voted for him.
By this silly and incorrect semantic argument, where everyone short of anarcho-capitalists can be labeled as socialists, Trump, Mitt Romney and Lula are all socialists. It’s just a waste of time.
It’s actually pretty simple. A socialist is anyone who advocates a post-capitalist society. Socialists do not advocate the types of mixed economies that social democrats like Lula advocate.
So Regular John is right - there are no prominent socialists in Western politics. There’s nobody prominent calling for the end of capitalism.
Thanks for proving my point.
This is what I'm referring to
@regular john This person is saying Trump's supporters are outnumbered by his critics. Trump has a 52% approval rating last I saw. Politics have become so divisive that people are unable to even recognize that people have opinions different from their own.
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Only 38% of the population is going to vote for him according to the latest pollsThanks for proving my point.
This is what I'm referring to
This person is saying Trump's supporters are outnumbered by his critics. Trump has a 52% approval rating last I saw. Politics have become so divisive that people are unable to even recognize that people have opinions different from their own.
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Trump's approval rating is ~43% and has never been above 46% for his entire Presidency.Thanks for proving my point.
This is what I'm referring to
This person is saying Trump's supporters are outnumbered by his critics. Trump has a 52% approval rating last I saw. Politics have become so divisive that people are unable to even recognize that people have opinions different from their own.
Rasmussen Report: Trump approval rating rises to 52% - Whats on Politics
Even if we accept 43% for the sake of having conversation That's still 4 out of 10 Americans who think he's doing A-okay.
Rasmussen is notoriously skewed in their data collection and reporting. Typically, when we interpret modern poll numbers we take a weighted average of all the credible polls to come up with a useful number, credibility based on historical prediction accuracy. My post was only for the sake of accuracy, not to debunk your thought that there are many out there who support this president and that their opinion can't be discounted, which I agree with.
Polls
Are we really taking polls seriously?
Propaganda my friends...It is all around you and in almost everything you read/watch.
I'd say yes to Diaz Canel and no to Maduro. Chavez had a very particular type of political economic system that included some centralization of industry and some wealth redistribution with petrodollars to the poor, but they mostly practiced a market system up until Maduro took power. Now I'd say they're living more in an authoritarian state with a pure state capitalist command economy. There is still a market system, but the currency is practically valueless and resources aren't being redistributed so much as just being all around scarce. The reality is so much of the world is living in these circumstances, except many lack the resources to barter with to maintain solvency, unlike Venezuela. Cuba is in the process of some slow, highly regulated liberalization, but is mostly still a command economy with a generally socialist political system. China is similar except they've allowed much more liberalization.
Generally, global North and South are more common ways of looking at the world than East and West in the post Cold War era, though that has its problems too, depending on what you're talking about.
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